It seems as though we are rapidly approaching the day in which diseases have evolved to be resistant to any molecule we can come up with that doesn't also kill the host.

I wish that there were a way to tell your bank that all electronic access is to be essentially read-only. I would like to make my bank login only allow viewing account balances and transferring money among that bank's accounts, and not even allowing seeing a full account number. For anything else, I can go into a physical branch.

Such a scheme would reduce attacks to someone annoying me by emptying my checking account into my savings account, causing overdrafts. A lot better than someone stealing my money.

Using a bank to store your money really ought to be more secure than putting cash under your mattress. It kind of sucks that it's gotten to this.

How can we reverse the trend of more and more devices only running code signed by the manufacturer?

That every new PC, which almost invariably comes with Windows 8, will run only Microsoft operating systems by default is very scary. Sure, you can disable that in current versions, but what about the next version?

I personally am dreaming of either quantum computing or a major breakthrough in the hidden subgroup problem to destroy RSA, DSA, and ECDSA, but won't hold my breath...

Now I want one =(

Shouldn't it be more like, quantum tamper detection? It's just using one-time pad in such a way that the pad's transmission getting intercepted will trigger the tamper detection mechanism.

It seems to me that Microsoft considers the desktop to be a legacy interface, and that tablet interfaces are the way of the future. It's as if they only support having desktop programs at all just for backward compatibility reasons, and that everything new should use Metro.

What Microsoft's Windows team doesn't understand is that there are many things a desktop interface can do that Metro cannot. For example, have more than two programs on the screen at once.

Some of these restrictions are even done for nothing but Microsoft's benefit, in the name of security. Metro applications cannot use plugins, because all executable code has to be signed by Microsoft at application publishing time. Metro applications cannot do runtime code generation, making it difficult to write a browser that performs well. Metro applications cannot read or write any files except their own or the ones it writes.

There are many things that Windows 8 added that were really awesome even for desktop use, but it's just been polluted with this Metro crap. Let's see... UEFI booting, really fast startup, better security hardening, storage spaces... but you're forced to get the tablet UI on a desktop.

It asks you whether you want to install the Ask Toolbar, defaulting to yes, of course, every time you install a security update.

I just updated Firefox between my "Flash freezing" post above and this post here, and I didn't have to log into Slashdot again.

Did they fix Flash freezing all the time, or is that Adobe's fault?

While that's possible, in general, there exist ways to determine whether a game has been translated by force. Because of the lack of the original source code, many of the changes to the existing code will be done as branches to other areas of ROM.

If you change the size of a block of assembly code, you have to adjust pointers throughout that segment and beyond. This is the task of an assembler and linker, working on your source code. For ROM hacking, you don't have the source. It's infeasible--and provably uncomputable in the general case--to know where all these pointers are, so that you can adjust them when you rebuild with hacks in place.

Thus, patched ROMs are made by placing branches in one part of the code pointing at some previously unused area, then jumping back after finishing whatever needed to happen there. These jumps can be detected in a thorough analysis of a given ROM image in comparison to its Japanese original. If it is clear that the code adjustments made for the English version were made by reassembling from source, the probability that it is a translation from the original author is very high.

You're probably right about that. I love FF3, FF4, FF6, FF7, FF9; moderately like FF1 and FF5; and totally hate FF2, FF8, FF10, FF12, FF13. And yes, I miss Nintendo Power. =)

My friend and I made the FF5 fan translation you played, but I never actually played through the game until like a decade later. FF5 wasn't one of my favorites, but it didn't suck like FF8 and FF13.

A lot of these in-app purchases have an entirely client-side effect, such as changing how much in-game money you have. As usual, if you control the hardware, you can do whatever you want.

If you have a jailbroken iDevice, you can make a program to change any client-side variable of a game by just calling task_for_pid and vm_write. No need to mess with the purchase receipt system at all.

Driver signing doesn't mean squat for security. Third-party drivers with security holes and back doors are a dime a dozen, and there are even some in Microsoft drivers, of course. I have a publicly-available CPU diagnostic utility that comes with a signed 64-bit driver that allows user mode to write to any desired MSR. That easily leads to executing arbitrary code execution, most easily by changing the syscall vector. Malware that acquires administrator privileges can just install some company's vulnerable driver.

Driver signing is really about DRM. Hollywood was strongly concerned about fake video card and sound card drivers being used to dump unencrypted content from protected sources. The proof of my statement is what happens when you boot the Vista/7/8 kernel in debug or test signing mode: everything works except Blu-Ray movies and other DRM content.

The new x86-64 ABI with 32-bit pointers is cool because it allows you to get the architecture improvements of x86-64, such as extra registers and RIP-relative addressing, without increasing memory usage substantially due to larger data structures. Also, 64-bit operations will just use the 64-bit registers. The vast majority of programs simply do not need the extra address space.

One reason that this ABI works so well is that the majority of the x86-64 instruction set uses 32-bit operations. Some operations involving pointers can be done in one instruction without using a temporary register to load a 64-bit constant.

Windows actually also can support this, in theory, but you're on your own in trying to communicate with the Win32 API. The linker option /LARGEADRESSAWARE:NO causes the NT kernel to limit your program's address space to 2^31 bytes.

How do you define that? This is a question I ran into once:

"Of the twelve proposed amendments in the [U.S.] Bill of Rights, how many were ratified by the states?"

The traditional answer is ten. But the real answer is actually eleven. If I were to answer that with 11 on a test, am I wrong?

(11 wasn't an available answer, so I answered 10.)